In July 2004, US cinema advertisements for Halo 2, the science fiction computer game, briefly carried the address for a website - ilovebees.com - which appeared to belong to a beekeeper who had mysteriously disappeared. Her honey-based recipes had been replaced by an apparently random list of numbers. Over four months 600,000 people joined in solving the mystery of what the numbers meant. What unfolded was a striking display of 'We Think': structured, mass collaborative creativity and intelligence.
People set up blogs and bulletin boards, websites and instant message groups. One 4,000-strong group, the Beekeepers, became the community's core, and discovered that the numbers were 210 sets of global positioning co-ordinates around the world and at each there was a public payphone.
The game's designers at 42 Entertainment in Los Angeles set the players a series of complex tasks and on the final day started calling 1,000 payphones on the East Coast of America. Whoever answered had to provide five words of intimate information, such as the name of their first girlfriend. The caller would then call another phone within the hour and expect to be told the five words. In the last of 12 challenges that day, the players had just 15 seconds to get the five words. They never once failed.
If ingenious games designers can inspire thousands of people to collaborate to solve a puzzle, could we do something similar to tackle global warming, keep communities safe, provide support for the elderly, help disaster victims, lend and borrow money, conduct political and policy debates, teach and learn, design and make physical products?
We are just starting to explore how we can organise ourselves without the trappings of traditional organisations. Watching 'I Love Bees' unfold is a bit like being in Detroit in 1905 when Henry Ford was still experimenting with mass production. A new organisational possibility is unfolding before our eyes. Where might We Think culture take us?
Political 'flash mobs' have already swung elections in Spain, the Philippines twice and South Korea. New political actors are emerging, from Move On in the US to the colour revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. The web is lowering the costs of mobilisation, even if it is only slowly improving the quality of democratic debate.
In China, set this year to become the largest internet society, middle-class protest groups are using mobile flash mobs to stage campaigns, despite the presence of 54,000 cyber police. The web is providing a new space in which democratic dissidents will gather. In Vietnam, the opposition People's Democratic Party was founded on the internet in 2005 and is organised online, partly using voice over internet phones.
The US is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a war to bring democracy to Iraq. Yet only 4 per cent of people in the Arab world have broadband access. The most potent way to promote democracy in the Middle East would be to get that figure above 50 per cent.
Perhaps the most famous - and unfairly maligned - example of We Think is Wikipedia, the free, volunteer-created encyclopaedia which now has more than six million articles in more than 250 languages. Complaints about minor inaccuracies in Wikipedia miss the point: this is just the first experiment in creating a global knowledge resource that is free to anyone on the planet. There is much more to come.
Two weeks ago the first 30,000 pages of the Encyclopedia of Life, covering the Earth's 1.8 million species, were put online. Jonathan Fanton, director of the MacArthur Foundation, one of the project's core funders, says it will be a 'global knowledge resource created by all, maintained by all and with benefit to all'. The British Library is planning to do something very similar.
The Encyclopedia of Life is part of a worldwide movement towards open-access science communities on the web. The research damning Prozac was published in the Public Library of Science Medicine, one of the leading online, open-access journals. The reader can click through to see the underlying data and join a growing conversation by leaving their own comment.
Open access publishing makes scientific research freely available on a global basis. That spreads knowledge further, faster to more people and so accelerates how theories are tested and improved. The research community becomes more productive through mass collaboration.
The US National Institutes of Health, which spends $28bn a year on research, has announced that from April it will require its 10,000-plus researchers to make research results available online. Harvard is to do likewise.
Most of the computer world did not notice in September 1991 when Linus Torvalds, a computer science student in Helsinki, released the first version of a program he had written called Linux. Torvalds put the program online with its source code, its basic recipe. Open source is software that nobody owns, everyone can use and anyone can improve.
The Linux community is the most impressive example of sustained We Think. A version of Linux released in June 2005 had 229 million lines in its source code that would have taken 60,000 man-years to develop at a cost of perhaps $8bn. Every day most people who use the web rely on open source: Google's servers run on Linux; most websites rely on servers running the open-source Apache program. Open source could in time provide a model for other areas of life, for example turning We Think into We Make.
Recently Procter and Gamble, the consumer goods giant, was visited by a grandmother who had designed her own nappy, sent a digital design to a manufacturer in China and shipped 2,500 samples into Britain. In Japan, the Elephant Design website involves consumers in advising companies how to make better products: it claims that six out of 10 of one leading Japanese retailer's top-selling products have been developed through the site.
The Open Architecture Network allows the public to download 400 designs contributed by 6,000 architects. Designs include a solar-powered water harvester, an electricity generator and a composting toilet.
Open Prosthetics, created by an engineer who lost an arm in the Iraq war, allows people with artificial limbs to share the adaptations and includes a section called Pimp My Arm. Charles Collis, a research engineer at Dyson, is hoping to create 'an internet of physical objects' - a public library of component designs that can be shared, amended and passed around as easily as music files.
In time even top-down public services will feel the power of We Think. Just launched in the UK is the School of Everything, which aims to be an eBay for stuff that does not get taught in school. Someone who wants to learn how to use the Garageband music program will be able to find someone who will provide a couple of hours of tuition.
In schools, children still learn from a teacher and a book. Yet in the 85 per cent of their time children spend outside school they learn from one another, often through social networks and computer games.
A prime example of this participative culture is World of Warcraft, which in four years has become one of the most successful games ever, with more than eight million players. Part of what makes it so attractive - critics would say addictive - is its social structure. There are 10 races, nine classes and two warring factions.
Many tasks are too complex to be undertaken alone, putting a premium on complementary abilities. Soon after the game was launched, guilds started to form. Some, like the one founded by the Japanese internet venture capitalist Joi Ito, have thousands of members.
In such games it's the players who create the content. A computer game with a million players only needs 1 per cent of them to create content for other players to use and the game has an unpaid development team of 10,000.
If we could persuade 1 per cent of Britain's pupils to be player-developers for education, that would be 70,000 new sources of learning. But that would require us to see learning as something more like a computer game, something that is done peer-to-peer, without a traditional teacher.
We are just at the start of exploring how we can be organised without the hierarchy of top-down organisations. There will be many false turns and failures. But there is also huge potential to create new stores of knowledge to the benefit of all, innovate more effectively, strengthen democracy and give more people the opportunity to make the most of their creativity.
The motto of the generation growing up with the collaborative logic of the web is not the solitary 'I think, therefore I am', it is be the social 'We think, therefore we are'.
· We Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production, by Charles Leadbeater, is published by Profile. Charles Leadbeater will discuss the book at the British Library on 26 March.
